Grimes, William

By: Peter Hinks

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Grimes, William

(b. 1784; d. 21 August 1865),
entrepreneur and autobiographer.

William Grimes was born enslaved in Virginia. His father was one of the wealthiest planters in the state, while his mother was the female slave of another local man, Dr. Steward. Grimes saw little of his mother because she was transferred to a distant household when he was still a child.

Grimes was owned at various times by no fewer than ten masters. His first years were spent in relatively easy labor in Dr. Steward's household. At age ten he was sold to Colonel William Thornton of Culpepper County, Virginia, thus beginning a long series of trials and journeys. Employed variously as a valet, house servant, and farmhand, Grimes would repeatedly detail in his autobiography the arbitrary and unpredictable labor and treatment to which he was subject. With Grimes serving coffee to one master's family in the morning, a jealous black cook sickened several family members by adding a volatile medicine to the pot; the dutiful young Grimes suffered severe whippings as punishment despite his pleas of innocence. When placed in the fields, Grimes was whipped for no reason by a black driver. He responded to this terror by running away—a problematic remedy that led sometimes to further whippings upon return but also on occasion to their temporary cessation. Grimes would later recollect, “I should not have been alive now if I had remained a slave, for I would have resisted with my life, when I became older, treatment which I have witnessed towards others.”

At about the age of fifteen Grimes was sold to a man who removed him to Savannah, Georgia. While traveling on foot to Savannah, Grimes became so despondent about his dislocation that he attempted to break his own leg. But after a divine epiphany he became determined not to destroy himself and knew that God would always care for him. In Savannah he labored as a house servant, a coachman, and a field hand.

In Savannah's urban environment, Grimes suffered the same cruel whippings and treatment from several owners as well as incarceration where food was scant, vermin profuse, and daily whippings unusually brutal. Yet through one of his owners, the Reverend Henry Collock, Grimes learned more of Scripture and had his faith strengthened. He also learned that his light complexion allowed him to impersonate a white man, especially at night, and he used that ability on several occasions to trick the night guards and extract himself and friends from troubles.

After a number of years Grimes's owners allowed him to hire his own time, and by the mid-1810s he befriended some black mariners on a ship from New York that he helped unload. Carefully building a covert inside a stack of cotton bales, they secreted Grimes away and enabled him to escape to New York, whence he immediately fled to New Haven, Connecticut. He quickly found work in the thriving business of the local black entrepreneur William Lanson and settled down, until he encountered a relative of a former Savannah owner and promptly fled New Haven for an interior town.

He returned to New Haven several months later and soon opened a prosperous barbershop that was patronized by Yale University students; he also furnished his patrons with food, wood, and other goods and services. He next launched a grocery store. Accusations of rowdiness and illicit sexual activity in his store led to an indictment and trial, but Grimes was acquitted. Despite his happy marriage to Clarissa Caesar in August 1817, Grimes fled New Haven after former owners appeared again, traveling to Providence, Rhode Island, and eventually stopping in Litchfield, Connecticut, where he resumed barbering. After four years there, further accusations and another trial led to his being warned out of Litchfield and returning to New Haven, where he remained for the balance of his years. While he resumed supplying Yale students with goods, his trade never became as profitable as it had previously been; in his latter years he sold lottery tickets and sought assistance from neighbors.

Throughout his life Grimes evinced great sympathy for abused slaves as well as the restricted free blacks of the North. At the conclusion of the first edition of his autobiography, published in 1824, he graphically offered his skin—the source of his and America's afflictions—as the vehicle for rewriting, redeeming, and binding anew a free America:

"If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will leave my skin as a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment, and then bind the constitution of glorious, happy, and free America. Let the skin of an American slave bind the charter of American liberty!"

See also Autobiography; Entrepreneurs; Free African Americans to 1828; Fugitive Slaves; Maritime Trades; and Skin Color.

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